Always take a backup file
Last week, a student of mine delivered a presentation in front of 600 people. My student is a Mac user, and therefore we had spent many hours preparing his slides in Apple’s Keynote. We had designed some really cool slide transitions to help demonstrate some points, we had also used a few videos as backdrops. When my student arrived at the venue (early, as I always teach) he discovered that for some reason his MacBook did not work properly with the projector being used at the venue.
Now in many cases, presenters do not think “what happens if something goes wrong?” I always make sure my students have a copy of their presentation saved on a USB drive in PowerPoint format (fortunately Keynote allows you to save your files as PowerPower). In this case my student was able to use his backup PowerPoint file to deliver his presentation.
And this brings me to the main point. Always, always and always prepare a backup file of your presentation. Even if you have prepared your file in PowerPoint, save a copy onto a USB drive. You never know what might go wrong with your computer. If you have prepared a Keynote file, save a copy of it as PowerPoint and so if you do have problems at venues with dated technology, or connectors, you can use someone else’s computer to deliver your presentation.
Another good practice is to save any unusual fonts that you might be using onto your USB drive. I gave a presentation last year, where I had to use someone else’s computer. Unfortunately, the computer I used did not have the same fonts that I had. I learned that I needed to make sure that I took copies of my fonts so that if I had to use another computer my presentation would not suffer.
So remember, backup, backup and backup.